More than one billion dollars clawed back from welfare cheats

A RECORD $1.4 billion has been recouped from welfare cheats including a man who stole the identity of dead children and a married mother who claimed she didn’t have a husband.

Scammers have been sprung as part of a joint investigation by the ­Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Centrelink.

A RECORD $1.4 billion has been recouped from welfare cheats including a man who stole the identity of dead children, and a married mother who claimed she didn’t have a husband in order to receive ­taxpayer-funded Centrelink payments.

In the past 18 months the Department of Human Services investigated more than 1400 cases of potential fraud, referring 956 of these to police, as part of its controversial data-matching policy.

Married mother-of-two Kristy Lee Wessing, 36, ­received $160,000 from Centrelink over 10 years after she claimed to be single.

A compliance system tracks anomalies between income reported to Centrelink and tax office information.

During the decade-long scam, the woman married the father of her children, set up a joint bank account and purchased a car with him.

The wannabe-single mum claimed to be living on a bush block and even invented a fake landlord before being caught and jailed for three years.

In another case, David Alan Knipe, 64, falsely claimed $125,586 in welfare payments over almost a decade by using a series of false identities.

Instead of spending his days looking for work, the con artist tracked down identification documents for two dead children who were born around the same time as him.

He even ­obtained a passport for one alias which he used for travel on eight occasions.

The scammer was sprung as part of a joint investigation by the ­Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Centrelink.

In a separate case, a childless woman allegedly claimed she was a mother in order to ­receive parenting payments.

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A Sydney woman working two jobs with a combined income of $88,895 was also caught claiming unemployment benefits.

Since the election the Turnbull government has recovered a record $1.4 billion in taxpayer funds through the automated compliance system, which ­detects discrepancies between fortnightly income reported to Centrelink and annual pay ­information held by the Australian Taxation Office.

But the government has agreed to “refine” the controversial data-matching program after tens of thousands of incorrect debt notices were sent to parents, people with disabilities, carers and jobseekers.

More than 600,000 cases a year are checked by the data-matching program which was automated in mid-2016 in a bid to claw back $4 billion from the ballooning $158 billion welfare bill.

Half a million more cases were checked last year than in 2012-13 when the government managed to recoup just $220 million in taxpayer cash.

Human Services Minister Michael Keenan told The Sunday Telegraph the government has a zero-tolerance approach to those who defraud the system.

“Australia has a generous social safety net, reflective of our fundamental belief in a fair go,” Mr Keenan said.

“While the majority of people do the right thing, there are those who set out to deliberately defraud the system, robbing Australian families in the process.”

He said Labor’s record on recouping cash from welfare cheats was “woeful” and the Coalition was “serious about ensuring only those entitled to payments receive them”.

Originally published as More than one billion dollars clawed back from welfare cheats